[Gluster-Maintainers] Announcing Gluster Release 6

[Shyam Ranganathan]

The Gluster community is pleased to announce the release of 6.0, our
latest release.

This is a major release that includes a range of code improvements and
stability fixes along with a few features as noted below.

A selection of the key features and bugs addressed are documented in
this [1] page.

Announcements:

1. Releases that receive maintenance updates post release 6 are, 4.1 and
5 [2]

2. Release 6 will receive maintenance updates around the 10th of every
month for the first 3 months post release (i.e Apr'19, May'19, Jun'19).
Post the initial 3 months, it will receive maintenance updates every 2
months till EOL. [3]

A series of features/xlators have been deprecated in release 6 as
follows, for upgrade procedures from volumes that use these features to
release 6 refer to the release 6 upgrade guide [4].

Features deprecated:
- Block device (bd) xlator
- Decompounder feature
- Crypt xlator
- Symlink-cache xlator
- Stripe feature
- Tiering support (tier xlator and changetimerecorder)

Highlights of this release are:
- Several stability fixes addressing, coverity, clang-scan, address
sanitizer and valgrind reported issues
- Removal of unused and hence, deprecated code and features
- Client side inode garbage collection
- This release addresses one of the major concerns regarding FUSE mount
process memory footprint, by introducing client side inode garbage
collection
- Performance Improvements
- "--auto-invalidation" on FUSE mounts to leverage kernel page cache
more effectively

Bugs addressed are provided towards the end, in the release notes [1]

Thank you,
Gluster community

References:
[1] Release notes: https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/release-notes/6.0/

[2] Release schedule: https://www.gluster.org/release-schedule/

[3] Gluster release cadence and version changes:
https://lists.gluster.org/pipermail/announce/2018-July/000103.html

[4] Upgrade guide to release-6:
https://docs.gluster.org/en/latest/Upgrade-Guide/upgrade_to_6/